---
title: Latticetail Moray (Gymnothorax buroensis)
scientific_name: Gymnothorax buroensis
common_name: Latticetail Moray
taxon: Moray eel
conservation_status: LC - Least Concern
published: 2024-10-25T18:09:45.244Z
updated: 2026-08-17T21:23:01.622Z
tags: Latticetail Moray, Gymnothorax buroensis, Moray eel, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/latticetail-moray
---

# Latticetail Moray (*Gymnothorax buroensis*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Moray eel (*Muraenidae*)
- **Size:** up to 39 cm
- **Depth:** 1-25 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Shallow reef and rubble
- **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner
- **Conservation status:** LC - Least Concern

## How to recognise it

- small brown moray with a fine pale network over the rear body and tail
- network densest on the tail, giving the latticed look the name refers to
- short blunt head
- up to 39 cm

Every moray on this reef began life as something that looks nothing like an eel.

Moray eggs hatch into a leptocephalus: a flat, transparent, leaf-shaped larva with a tiny head and a body like a sliver of glass, so clear that print can be read through it. It has almost no muscle and it does not hunt in any ordinary sense - it absorbs dissolved organic matter and drifts, sometimes for many months, carried by currents across whole ocean basins. That drift is why a forty-centimeter eel living in one hole in one reef can belong to a species spread from Africa to Polynesia.

When it finally settles, the larva shrinks. It loses water and body depth, reorganizes into a small eel, and takes up residence in rubble, and from that point on it may never travel more than a few meters again.

This one is among the smaller morays here, under forty centimeters, brown with a fine pale net over the back half of the body that gets denser toward the tail. It lives shallow, in rubble and reef, and it is seen about as often as anything that spends its life inside rock.

## Also known as

- **English:** vagrant moray, Buro Moray, Buru Moray Eel
- **Hebrew:** ניבן ברוד
- **French:** Murène errante, Murène noire, Murène
- **Spanish:** Morena Enrejado, Morena Errante, Morena Estriada
- **Portuguese:** Moréia-estriada
- **Czech:** muréna kajelská
- **Japanese:** サンゴウツボ, Sangoutsubo
- **Chinese:** 伯恩斯裸胸鯙, 伯恩斯裸胸鱔, 伯恩斯裸胸鳝
- **MAL:** Malanhi, മലഞ്ഞി, മാലഞി
- **TAH:** puhi
- **TGL:** Malibanos

## Scientific synonyms

- *Gymnothorax corallinus* (Klunzinger, 1871)
- *Lycodontis buroensis* (Bleeker, 1857)
- *Muraena buroensis* Bleeker, 1857
- *Muraena corallina* Klunzinger, 1871

## Range

Comoros, Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Republic of Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/moray-eel/latticetail-moray)*
*Updated: August 17, 2026*